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Technology Stocks : Gemstar Intl (GMST) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (6470)	4/12/2004 8:48:08 PM
From: tinkershaw	Respond to of 6516

<<<I was completely unaware (big surprise, huh) that satellite can't broadcast point to point.>>> It is not impossible, picture Globalstar, and DirectTV and DISH did roll-out some plan a few years back to provide broadband connection to their customers. It appears however, and other more expert in the field can chime in if any such persons are on the board, but that your satellites must be custom made if they want to do point to point, and the bandwidth demands are incredible. Much less the ability to pin point all your customers, around the country, from one or more satellites, to the exact location of your satellite receiver so as to avoid screwing up the receivers of the customers who may be in the same block, neighborhood, town, city, or even state. Imagine streaming a VOD to 1000 households at a time, all at different times, at different locations, or 10,000, 100,000, et al., while continuing to deliver the regular point to multi-point channels, many in HDTV. It just does not seem to be something that is practically executionable with the present satellite technology and configurations. Globalstar could do it because it was much lower bandwidth demands, and designed specifically for that purpose. Globalstar also utilized the terrestrial cellular system for most of its phone calls. But it does distinquish cable from satellite service, and this is certainly an advantage to cable who can routinely conduct two way interactivity. Tinker